SES London: Avinash Kaushnik on long-tail keywords

Avinash Kaushnik was a strong opener on the first day of Search Engine Strategies 2010 London. He baffled the audience with a mix of bold statements and smart yet accessible, inspiring & valuable insights. Two quotes: “The biggest gift of the internet is the ability to be proven wrong, fast!” and “Anyone who doesn't feel frustrated that they're not doing well enough is not doing their job properly”.

Google’s SEM evangelist focused strongly on analytics and goals. And these goals don’t have to be all about conversion.

Avinash also talked about long-tail search queries. It’s indeed a topic that receives a lot of attention these days. And not only in Search Engine Marketing.

The increase of longer search queries

It’s as if Chris Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’ is being applied to all marketing areas, including social media marketing, content marketing, social bookmarking, article marketing, etc.

But of course there are also facts and the increasing attention on long-tail keywords in SEM is obvious when looking at the way people search .

Remember that end of last year, Experian Hitwise found that longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 3% between October and September 2009 (based on U.S. searches).

This is related to the importance of long-tail keywords (although it’s surely not the same!).

Searches of eight or more words increased 4% to a total of 3,49%.

The same time period showed that shorter search queries (one to four words long) decreased 1% from month to month.

A trend that will continue? Wait and see. What’s your take on long-tail keywords?

The biggest element to having your website found is using the proper
keywords. For example, are you sure that the keywords you are using are
the most commonly searched keywords that pertain to your industry? There
are tools available that allow for you to find out the most commonly
used keywords when people search for products that you sell down to the
brand and even when people search for your competitors. One of them is
social media monitoring. Social media is becoming more impo...... read more